What it's about
The Winterthurer Streichquartett gets extra players! The ensemble, made up of the four section leaders of the violins, violas and cellos, doubles in size: it becomes an octet line-up, made famous above all by the celebrated Opus 20 by the 16-year-old Felix Mendelssohn from 1825. Georges Enescu was only three years older when he completed his no less monumental string octet in 1900. The four movements, whose motifs are built cyclically, flow straight into one another and form a single large movement – a form that was not unusual in Paris, where Enescu spent much of his life. Like Schönberg’s sextet Verklärte Nacht, composed a year earlier, the octet stands on the threshold between Romanticism and modernism, but is far more firmly rooted in classical counterpoint. Given this consistently polyphonic structure, it is no surprise that Enescu spent well over a year and a half working on the piece. If you do not know it, you must at least have heard it once in your life. You only really understand it after hearing it several times, though. So it is a lucky coincidence that the octet also sounds in the subscription concert on 21./22. April, this time in choral scoring! Mozart took just as long over his three “Prussian” quartets. When the trip to the court of King Frederick William II in Potsdam ended without any concert engagements, Mozart hoped to impress the cello-playing monarch with quartets at least. He was able to complete the first string quartet, with suitably rewarding solos for the cello, as early as June 1789. But back in Vienna, money worries plagued him again; the “laborious work” on the two further quartets dragged on until the summer of the following year. They never fulfilled their purpose either – they were premiered in Mozart’s quartet subscription concerts in 1790 and 1791 in Vienna, and published, of course without any dedication to the King of Prussia, only shortly after Mozart’s death. George Enescu: Streichoktett C-Dur, op. 7 Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart: Streichquartett Nr. 23 F-Dur, KV 590 Ensemble: Winterthurer Streichquartett Violine: Bogdan Božović Francesco Sica Ralph Orendain Anzhela Golubyeva Staub Viola: Jürg Dähler Chie Tanaka Violoncello: Flurin Cuonz Anikó Illényi
